Search

Ecological research increasingly relies on broad‐scale databases containing information collected by personnel from a variety of sources, including government agencies, universities, and citizen‐science programs. However, the contribution of citizen‐science programs to these databases is not well known. We analyzed one such database to quantify the contribution of citizen science to lake water‐quality data from seven US states. Citizen‐science programs not only provided over half of the observations for commonly sampled water‐quality measures (water clarity, nutrients, and algal biomass) from the past 31 years, but also contributed to the majority of long‐term monitoring (>15 years) for selected measures in lakes. While previous studies have demonstrated the usefulness of citizen science for research, management, policy, and public engagement, our study demonstrates that citizen science can also make valuable contributions to populating broad‐scale ecological databases. Strengthening partnerships between citizen‐science programs and monitoring agencies can help maintain and expand spatial and temporal data coverage during the "big data" era of ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecologists are increasingly discovering that ecological processes are made up of components that are multi-scaled in space and time. Some of the most complex of these processes are cross-scale interactions (CSIs), which occur when components interact across scales. When undetected, such interactions may cause errors in extrap-olation from one region to another. CSIs, particularly those that include a regional scaled component, have not been systematically investigated or even reported because of the challenges of acquiring data at sufficiently broad spatial extents. We present an approach for quantifying CSIs and apply it to a case study investigating one such interaction, between local and regional scaled land-use drivers of lake phosphorus. Ultimately, our approach for investigating CSIs can serve as a basis for efforts to understand a wide variety of multi-scaled prob-lems such as climate change, land-use/land-cover change, and invasive species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to understand ecological systems at scales critical to human decision making. Current reward structures are problematic for scientists engaged in interdisciplinary research, particu-larly early career researchers, because academic culture tends to value only some research outputs, such as pri-mary-authored publications. Here, we present a framework for the costs and benefits of collaboration, with a focus on early career stages, and show how the implementation of novel measures of success can help defray the costs of collaboration. Success measures at team and individual levels include research outputs other than publications, including educational outcomes, dataset creation, outreach products (eg blogs or social media), and the application of scientific results to policy or management activities. Promotion and adoption of new measures of success will require concerted effort by both collaborators and their institutions. Expanded mea-sures should better reflect and reward the important work of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary teams at all career stages, and help sustain and stimulate a collaborative culture within ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative research teams are a necessary and desirable component of most scientific endeavors. Effective col-laborative teams exhibit important research outcomes, far beyond what could be accomplished by individuals working independently. These teams are made up of researchers who are committed to a common purpose, approach, and performance goals for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. We call such collabora-tions "high-performing collaborative research teams". Here, we share lessons learned from our collective experi-ence working with a wide range of collaborative teams and structure those lessons within a framework developed from literature in business, education, and a relatively new discipline, "science of team science". We propose that high-performing collaborative research teams are created and maintained when team diversity (broadly defined) is effectively fostered and interpersonal skills are taught and practiced. Finally, we provide some strategies to fos-ter team functioning and make recommendations for improving the collaborative culture in ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important goal of macrosystems ecology (MSE) research is to advance understanding of ecological systems at both fine and broad temporal and spatial scales. Our premise in this paper is that MSE projects require inte-grated information management at their inception. Such efforts will lead to improved communication and sharing of knowledge among diverse project participants, better science outcomes, and more transparent and accessible (ie "open") science. We encourage researchers to "complete the data life cycle" by publishing well-documented datasets, thereby facilitating re-use of the data to answer new and different questions from the ones conceived by those involved in the original projects. The practice of documenting and submitting datasets to data repositories that are publicly accessible ensures that research results and data are available to and use-able by other researchers, thus fostering open science. However, ecologists are often unfamiliar with the require-ments and information management tools for effectively preserving data and receive little institutional or pro-fessional incentive to do so. Here, we provide recommendations for achieving these ends and give examples from current MSE projects to demonstrate why information management is critical for ensuring that scientific results can be reproduced and that data can be shard for future use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macrosystems ecology is the study of diverse ecological phenomena at the scale of regions to continents and their interactions with phenomena at other scales. This emerging subdiscipline addresses ecological questions and environmental problems at these broad scales. Here, we describe this new field, show how it relates to modern ecological study, and highlight opportunities that stem from taking a macrosystems perspective. We present a hierarchical framework for investigating macrosystems at any level of ecological organization and in relation to broader and finer scales. Building on well-established theory and concepts from other subdisci-plines of ecology, we identify feedbacks, linkages among distant regions, and interactions that cross scales of space and time as the most likely sources of unexpected and novel behaviors in macrosystems. We present three examples that highlight the importance of this multiscaled systems perspective for understanding the ecology of regions to continents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor demonstrate the need to integrate the single-investigator model of science in ecology with a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach.